Have you tried putting a disk in the drive and seeing if it shows up on the desktop?

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Good point! I just tried. If I eject the drive in Toast, put a disc that has data on it into the drive, the disc DOES appear on the desktop. Seems to OSX itself has "forgotten" I have a drive until Toast8 lets me add the disc.

Click on finder preferences>sidebar and make sure CD's and DVD's are selected.

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Yep they are.

Also to note; the eject button on my keyboard no longer works (so I cannot open the drive to put a disk in, other than by opening Toast8 and ejecting via there), and the little Eject CD thing that used to be in the bar across the top of the screen has vanished too!

Something I saw on another board was to the effect that some drives will go to sleep and not wake up given certain circumstances.

So try going into Energy Saver and unchecking the box that reads "Put hard drives to sleep when possible". This will at least extend the wake period of your drives (hard and optical) to three hours rather than the default 15mins)

This may help, or it may not, but please report back and see if it helps you. I've not been testing this workaround long enough to know if it has worked for me!

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